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"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women." In the Heinl

"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women." In the Heinlein universe, the Howard Foundation runs a voluntary eugenics program by paying people with particularly long lived ancestors to mate with each other. Protagonist Lazarus Long is a product of this. The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity. I'm a firm opponent of any kind of coercive eugenics. But it seems like it would be a good use of a billionaire's fortune to establish such a foundation for the promotion of intelligence, by paying very smart people to make babies together. But in Heinlein, the "Howards" became reviled and were forced off of the planet. If we do create a particularly smart population by eugenics, perhaps their primary task should be to find a way to protect themselves from us normals, a treatment for tall poppy syndrome. Of course, the first resort is secrecy. So we wouldn't know if they already exist.

throwvirtever 5y ago
An IQ is just a number coming out of a test. Whether or not that correlates to something useful for humanity, or even the individual being tested, is a different question. Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs, but would juicing the numbers through eugenics really make much of a difference? How many extra Isaac Newtons would it take to make controlled nuclear fusion work? Because if we don't have an estimate for that, why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all?
- notahacker 5y ago
  Not to mention the regression to the mean issue discussed in the article, and the slight problem of attracting women aware that they have a very high IQ to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment. It's not like they're currently disproportionately likely to choose not to have kids because they can't afford them
  - PKop 5y ago
    >to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and being a mother"...where ">" can be more enjoyable or fulfilling. It's not clear that this is true. Part of "baby making" means leveraging that IQ in a productive way to raise strong, intelligent children, so it would not be going to waste.
    - netflixandkill 5y ago
      When affluent and educated societies worldwide show declining birthrates and increasing age at reproduction, it can be taken as a strong indicator of women's and family's preferences for fulfilling lives at demographic scale.
    - me_im_counting 5y ago
      I’m a woman, and none of my smartest friends are interested in having more than 2 children. A few aren’t interested in having any. I’m the weirdo who wants 3, but I don’t see why I should be part of someone’s experiments when I can find a high quality mate on my own anyway.
      - Enginerrrd 5y ago
        Yeah, it's interesting, humans already HAVE an incredibly complex sexual selection mechanism. There's all kinds of things that you are capable of selecting for without necessarily even realizing what you're doing. That selection pressure likely already includes the relevant things such a billionaire might care about, and many other things they can't even quantify, which likely includes genetic compatibility. The system we have has worked pretty well for a long time. It's hard to optimize such a complex and fuzzy thing.
      - civilized 5y ago
        So maybe the billionaire should enact his horrific eugenics experiment by creating a dating app to help women like you find high-quality men who want lots of kids. He'd even make money, because... well, be honest, how much would you pay for that if it really worked?
- PKop 5y ago
  >why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all? Are there no uses of a having a higher population average intelligence besides "does it immediately produce nuclear fusion"? Is higher average intelligence good for many many many other things besides producing fusion? Of course it is, this is an absurd premise. Also, where did nuclear fission get invented? Are there correlated differences in IQ of people from this region? Did nuclear fission get invented in areas with low average IQ? "An IQ is a just a number coming out of a test". Oh, but it does correlate with other group-wide achievements that aren't just numbers coming out of a test, does it not? >Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs How it is not obvious then that increasing the average would also increase the level of the outliers and their ceiling?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
pjscott 5y ago
> The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity. Not for lifespan. What the author didn't mention is that this equation works for traits affected by a large number of genetic variants, each with small, roughly additive effects. Most heritable traits are like this, and if you plot the probability distribution for one, it looks like a normal distribution. Lifespan, on the other hand, is not at all normally distributed and you shouldn't expect it to work the same way as things like height. (Regarding your proposal, another idea that would probably be more cost-effective is to find people who are already extremely smart and clone them. More details: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/ https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the...)
- robocat 5y ago
  To add to your point, here is a distribution of heights: https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-distributions/ https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-dis... and here is a distribution of ages: https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expectancy-inequality https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expect...
- gwern 5y ago
  Life span can be easily translated into standardized units more convenient to talk about which the breeder's equation would apply to, the same way binary or categorical or polytomous traits can often be treated as a normal latent with thresholds. And people calculate heritability of lifespan all the time. (It's low, but that's not because lifespan happens to be Gompertz-distributed.)
bsder 5y ago
This wouldn't work for "longevity" because "longevity" isn't a bell curve. If "longevity" were a bell curve, we would see some humans at the 150 years old mark. We do not. Human longevity has a "cliff" that it won't go past. Selective breeding could get you arbitrarily close to whatever that cliff actually is, but no further. To get further than that cliff, you would have to fix all the issues that cause it. There is no guarantee (and practically an anti-guarantee) that selective breeding would ever accomplish that.
- setr 5y ago
  > If "longevity" were a bell curve, we would see some humans at the 150 years old mark. We do not. I agree with everything else (including that its not a bell curve), but this particular reasoning seems off — it could still follow a bell curve even if we never see the rarer items… because we’re only talking about approximating a bell curve. Just as height’s bell curve suggests a 30ft human could eventually occur, but we’d never actually expect it to actually happen in reality (because confounding factors will start to trigger) - but we still say height follows a bell curve.
  - bsder 5y ago
    No, the bell curve for height does not suggest a 30ft human would ever occur. That would be somewhere around 90+ standard deviations out--that's so wildly improbable as to be effectively 0. A "mere" 7 standard deviations is effectively 1 in a billion. And that's somewhere around a 7 1/2 foot tall human (who we do see occasionally). "Standard deviation of lifespan" (a somewhat erroneous idea since we're not actually on a bell curve) is somewhere around 10 years. 150 years old is 7 standard deviations--improbable but not impossible. If we're following a bell curve, 1 in a billion people should be 140 years+ and 1 in 10,000 should be 120 years+. The fact that we don't see these probabilities is extremely strong evidence we're not on a bell curve. And not being on a bell curve immediately throws out huge chunks of statistical "rules".
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Here's an example of it happening: The Chinese government explicitly hooked up Yao Ming's parents. I will bet he's not the only one.

throwvirtever 5y ago

An IQ is just a number coming out of a test. Whether or not that correlates to something useful for humanity, or even the individual being tested, is a different question. Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs, but would juicing the numbers through eugenics really make much of a difference? How many extra Isaac Newtons would it take to make controlled nuclear fusion work? Because if we don't have an estimate for that, why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all?

notahacker 5y ago
Not to mention the regression to the mean issue discussed in the article, and the slight problem of attracting women aware that they have a very high IQ to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment. It's not like they're currently disproportionately likely to choose not to have kids because they can't afford them
- PKop 5y ago
  >to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and being a mother"...where ">" can be more enjoyable or fulfilling. It's not clear that this is true. Part of "baby making" means leveraging that IQ in a productive way to raise strong, intelligent children, so it would not be going to waste.
  - netflixandkill 5y ago
    When affluent and educated societies worldwide show declining birthrates and increasing age at reproduction, it can be taken as a strong indicator of women's and family's preferences for fulfilling lives at demographic scale.
  - me_im_counting 5y ago
    I’m a woman, and none of my smartest friends are interested in having more than 2 children. A few aren’t interested in having any. I’m the weirdo who wants 3, but I don’t see why I should be part of someone’s experiments when I can find a high quality mate on my own anyway.
    - Enginerrrd 5y ago
      Yeah, it's interesting, humans already HAVE an incredibly complex sexual selection mechanism. There's all kinds of things that you are capable of selecting for without necessarily even realizing what you're doing. That selection pressure likely already includes the relevant things such a billionaire might care about, and many other things they can't even quantify, which likely includes genetic compatibility. The system we have has worked pretty well for a long time. It's hard to optimize such a complex and fuzzy thing.
    - civilized 5y ago
      So maybe the billionaire should enact his horrific eugenics experiment by creating a dating app to help women like you find high-quality men who want lots of kids. He'd even make money, because... well, be honest, how much would you pay for that if it really worked?
PKop 5y ago
>why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all? Are there no uses of a having a higher population average intelligence besides "does it immediately produce nuclear fusion"? Is higher average intelligence good for many many many other things besides producing fusion? Of course it is, this is an absurd premise. Also, where did nuclear fission get invented? Are there correlated differences in IQ of people from this region? Did nuclear fission get invented in areas with low average IQ? "An IQ is a just a number coming out of a test". Oh, but it does correlate with other group-wide achievements that aren't just numbers coming out of a test, does it not? >Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs How it is not obvious then that increasing the average would also increase the level of the outliers and their ceiling?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

pjscott 5y ago

> The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity. Not for lifespan. What the author didn't mention is that this equation works for traits affected by a large number of genetic variants, each with small, roughly additive effects. Most heritable traits are like this, and if you plot the probability distribution for one, it looks like a normal distribution. Lifespan, on the other hand, is not at all normally distributed and you shouldn't expect it to work the same way as things like height. (Regarding your proposal, another idea that would probably be more cost-effective is to find people who are already extremely smart and clone them. More details: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/ https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the...)

robocat 5y ago
To add to your point, here is a distribution of heights: https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-distributions/ https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-dis... and here is a distribution of ages: https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expectancy-inequality https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expect...
gwern 5y ago
Life span can be easily translated into standardized units more convenient to talk about which the breeder's equation would apply to, the same way binary or categorical or polytomous traits can often be treated as a normal latent with thresholds. And people calculate heritability of lifespan all the time. (It's low, but that's not because lifespan happens to be Gompertz-distributed.)

bsder 5y ago

This wouldn't work for "longevity" because "longevity" isn't a bell curve. If "longevity" were a bell curve, we would see some humans at the 150 years old mark. We do not. Human longevity has a "cliff" that it won't go past. Selective breeding could get you arbitrarily close to whatever that cliff actually is, but no further. To get further than that cliff, you would have to fix all the issues that cause it. There is no guarantee (and practically an anti-guarantee) that selective breeding would ever accomplish that.

setr 5y ago
> If "longevity" were a bell curve, we would see some humans at the 150 years old mark. We do not. I agree with everything else (including that its not a bell curve), but this particular reasoning seems off — it could still follow a bell curve even if we never see the rarer items… because we’re only talking about approximating a bell curve. Just as height’s bell curve suggests a 30ft human could eventually occur, but we’d never actually expect it to actually happen in reality (because confounding factors will start to trigger) - but we still say height follows a bell curve.
- bsder 5y ago
  No, the bell curve for height does not suggest a 30ft human would ever occur. That would be somewhere around 90+ standard deviations out--that's so wildly improbable as to be effectively 0. A "mere" 7 standard deviations is effectively 1 in a billion. And that's somewhere around a 7 1/2 foot tall human (who we do see occasionally). "Standard deviation of lifespan" (a somewhat erroneous idea since we're not actually on a bell curve) is somewhere around 10 years. 150 years old is 7 standard deviations--improbable but not impossible. If we're following a bell curve, 1 in a billion people should be 140 years+ and 1 in 10,000 should be 120 years+. The fact that we don't see these probabilities is extremely strong evidence we're not on a bell curve. And not being on a bell curve immediately throws out huge chunks of statistical "rules".

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

Here's an example of it happening: The Chinese government explicitly hooked up Yao Ming's parents. I will bet he's not the only one.